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Welcome to the open Crowd Review for postmedieval’s special issue on Comic Medievalisms, edited by Louise D’Arcens (University of Wollongong). The issue includes six original articles that have been culled by Prof. D’Arcens for the purposes of launching a collective investigation into the role of laughter and humor in “medievalism”—meaning, the uses of the Middle Ages in popular and other cultures over time. Prof. D’Arcens is a particularly apt editor for this project as she was recently awarded a 4-year Australia Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship for her project “Comic Medievalism and the Modern World” (2013-2017), and has a book forthcoming from Boydell and Brewer, Laughing at the Middle Ages: Comic Medievalism.

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All of the articles, initially solicited by Prof. D’Arcens, have been reviewed by Prof. D’Arcens multiple times and have also been revised multiple times by the authors, and they have already been accepted for publication by both Prof. D’Arcens and the editors of postmedieval (Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman). This crowd review will serve as a second layer of what might be termed “external” review, with the implicit understanding that all comments offered (and from whatever corners) are provided to assist the authors in strengthening their articles, whether in terms of methodology and theory, evidence and sources, structure and organization, styles and modes of address, and the like. This Crowd Review is thus a form of collective editing and even co-composing of material already deemed fit for publication, but which nevertheless could benefit from a multiplicity of perspectives, amateur to professional, non-specialist to specialist. As Jen Boyle and Martin Foys wrote in their “Editors’ Vision Statement” for postmedieval’s first Crowd Review of our special issue on “Becoming Media” (see HERE),

Why not invite a crowd? The concepts and frames of webby/webbies are likely to produce some anxiety. The “web” has become somewhat of a pejorative among some professionals, evocative as it is of the crowd on the street and “average” Joes and Janes. The concept of the crowd to some might seem particularly inimical to academic institutions or professionalism. Crowds imply mobs. Crowds imply amateur opinion, cajoling, and yelling. But crowds also now connect with activities like “crowdsourcing,” an open call for collaboration among a large group of informed participants interested in exploring, creating, or solving. And crowds also change things. The crowd potentially embodies an exciting challenge to the isolation and insularity of traditional academic organizations, as an opportunity to experiment with the re-structuring of professional and disciplinary affiliation.

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The Crowd Review for “Comic Medievalisms” will run from Wednesday, November 6th through Sunday, December 15th. You can find out more about how to read and comment on these essays by following the links in the Table of Contents on the right or by going directly to “About this site.” And if you have any questions or concerns about how to participate, please contact either Eileen Joy (eileenajoy@gmail.com) or Myra Seaman (seaman@cofc.edu) directly.

The idea of the medieval is always differentiated from the idea of the modern. For Coleridge and Keats it offered relief from urban and mercantile modernity. Modern medievalism rises in the 1970s when people lose faith in futurism. Debates like these can only be developed separarely, not gestured at in an essay like this, opening up for the first time one of the initatory gestures towards modern medievalism –though in fact Chretien deTroyes is a medievalist,and a good deal more positively than Voltaire and those who feel Chaucer might be a release from respectability (never in my experience female).

As commented above post-modern uncertainty may be contemporarily gratifying, but it didn’t help Jeanne at her execution. Texts relate to realities and have potentially real political and attitudinal impacts, and the savage sexism of this allegedly classic text deserves exposing.

Voltaire’s firm efforts to deny authorship of the apparently offensive elements indicate that he at least thought of it as an authorial text, but then he had not read Haydn White as way of disavowing responsibility in postmodern mode. The `mess’ of the textual state is a product of limuted shclkarship rather than ultra-modernity.

Just as the story of Queen Elizabeth onthe 18th C stage, with relfemale actorsalised, so the medieval myth is drawn into the physical emotionalisation of narrative, which will provide secondary energy for the tradition, and remain present as Tennyson reworks the Arthur myth in his first idyll `Merlin and Vivien’.